The BadTerrible touchscreen user interface; no touch control when the phone is slid open; poorly organised features; unimpressive camera; PlayStation 3 streaming is hard to configure.

The Bottom LineWe can't fault the Sony Ericsson Aino for its ambition, but its headline features, such as PlayStation 3 streaming, are hard to use and confusing. The touchscreen half of its split personality is poorly implemented, and its huge suite of features can be overwhelming. If you ignore the bells and whistles, the Aino is a lovely-looking slider phone with a couple of excellent accessories included, but it's too expensive to be just that

6.5 Overall

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Sony Ericsson's Aino is proof that the higher you reach the harder you can fall. This phone looked like it had huge potential, but, in the end, just gave us a pain in the Aino. Sporting groovy good looks, it's packed with innovative features, including the ability to remotely
control your PlayStation 3. Unfortunately, its huge range of interesting
features is poorly organised and occasionally nonsensical.

The Aino is available for free on a £35-a-month contract,
or around £390 SIM-free.

Remote controllerGet ready for some heart-breaking news. The Sony Ericsson
Aino is not the much-rumoured PSP phone. But it is a phone with a very special
relationship with the PS3. Register the phone with your PS3 and
you should be able to stream video and audio over Wi-Fi or 3G from anywhere in
the world. You can't play games, but you can turn your PS3 on and off, which is
pretty cool.

We tried the 'remote play' feature on two different wireless networks, and found that some work is needed to get it up and running.
Sony Ericsson has posteda guide
to remote play on its Web site, but it's superficial. It glosses
over configuring port-forwarding on your wireless router, which is just as
techie as it sounds and something that you may have to do to make the wireless-control feature work.

With the Aino's slide-out keypad deployed, the touchscreen fun comes to an end

We were able to test the feature by wirelessly connecting
straight to our PS3 without going over the Wi-Fi network. When it works,
it's very cool. You can easily navigate around your PS3 on the phone, and
watching video, for example, is fun. But, again, don't expect this feature
to be easy to set up. We also expect that the results would be poor-quality over
the 3G network.

Look, but don't touchThe Aino also separates itself from the phone herd by mixing
touchscreen and non-touchscreen interfaces. When this slider phone is open,
it's an utterly normal non-touchscreen phone. But, when it's closed, it has a
totally different, touch-sensitive user interface. In this mode, it doesn't
show most of its plethora of features -- instead, it's a media device that you can touch to view your photos, videos and music.

The touchscreen is fairly responsive, and the icons look good, but the user interface works poorly. For example, you can only select your music by album,
not by artist or other category. You can listen to playlists, but you'll
have to slide the phone out to change them or add a song. It's a very restrictive system,
especially compared to that of a dedicated MP3 player like the Sony
Walkman NWZ-S544.

It's also unclear where you should touch to make something happen -- for example, to
go back a level. We saw some technical hiccups as well, such as the
controls being duplicated all over the video-playing screen.

When you shut the slider, the touchscreen fun ends abruptly.
We really missed the touch capability when we had the phone open and were
surfing the Web, for instance, since the ability to poke a link can really come in
handy.

Feature partyThere's no shortage of applications on the Aino -- Sony Ericsson
has stuffed in every feature it could think of.
Unfortunately, it hasn't designed the user interface to handle it all, so
menus often feel like they offer too many options. For example, when we selected 'organiser',
which is represented by a calendar-page icon on the main menu, we expected to see the
calendar. Instead, we saw a list of 14 more options, including video-calling and
file-transfer features, and a folder containing the apps we installed from Sony
Ericsson's app store.